1 Topic by Kenak

  • Registered: 2004-11-18
  • Posts: 2,391

Topic: NXE: New XBox Experience

Today is the launch of the new XBOX dashboard update, which basically revamps the old blade system into a sort of windows media-player style setup. It also comes with Avatars (which are a creepy rare-miis), 8 player party chat support, 16:10, hard drive installs for games, and a bunch of other shit. I really like the new interface, and the new guide is essentially a dumbed down blade-dash setup, and probably best of all, you can switch between games from it (so no exiting to the dashboard to change XBLA games). Microsoft also has a Community Games section, which allows you to download games made using XNA by amateur developers.
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3007/3041117753_914fc65d3b_o.jpg
And you can copy this url: http://avatar.xboxlive.com/avatar/???/avatar-body.png, and replace the ??? with your gamer tag (%20 for spaces) to post a picture of your avatar.
http://avatar.xboxlive.com/avatar/TheGuyBhindYou/avatar-body.png
Overall, I like it much better. I'm playing Banjo with it installed to the hard drive (great game, btw), and I'm liking the cut down in load times. Avatars are kinda meh, but I'm not going to complain about something I can ignore.

http://card.mygamercard.net/nxe/mini/TheGuyBhindYou.png

2 Reply by Kynax

  • Registered: 2003-01-29
  • Posts: 844

Re: NXE: New XBox Experience

Looks nice, haven't had time to play much with it, but I already have some gripes with it:

1. I had some nice backgrounds set up, but now a fugly gray "ground" hides the bottom half and I have yet to find out how to remove it.

2. 16:10 support... I use a VGA cable to feed the video to my 24" computer monitor supporting 1920x1200, but the available resolution go up to 1920x1080 (ie 1080p). I do realize that 1080p should be enough for anybody (just like 640k) and that it would require more power to up the resolution another notch, but it should be available at least in the NXE. I can live with games staying at 1080p.

3. The Xbox guide is still a bit slow to load/display. While in NXE, pressing the xbox button will show the gray box and it then takes a few seconds for the menu to actually appear. Mind you, that's not even while playing a game, so it should be a lot snappier.

Anyhow, I'm still glad MS took the time to revamp the look of the OS, but only time will tell if it was a switch for the better...

Go Habs Go!

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  • Registered: 2006-03-17
  • Posts: 450

Re: NXE: New XBox Experience

Kynax wrote:

3. The Xbox guide is still a bit slow to load/display. While in NXE, pressing the xbox button will show the gray box and it then takes a few seconds for the menu to actually appear. Mind you, that's not even while playing a game, so it should be a lot snappier.

Weird. I've never seen this happen here, and I've been running it since end of October, through the preview program.

Overall I think it's great and the avatars are completely out of the way if you don't care about them. Installing games and the party system are the main new features as far as I'm concerned, but the new UI is good too. Also the speed of the guide in-game.

As far as use of the avatars, Kenak, there are some 3 arcade games out already allowing you to use them, and I believe the latest Scene It has support for them too.

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<Bill_> it really, really hurts to say this
<Bill_> really
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